lpetrich

The conventional wisdom is that it was written in contemporary Koine Greek, and I wonder what the usual arguments for it are.

Half a millennium ago, Erasmus argued on stylistic grounds that the Greek version is the original version; I wonder what his arguments were. Yes, the Erasmus that put together the Textus Receptus version of the GNT.

Also, the Greek version quotes from the Septuagint several times; that is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. If the NT's original language was not Greek, then its translators must have been very careful to put in the Septuagint's exact words.

And the earliest references to its contents by the Church Fathers are references to the Greek version's contents.

Is that reasonable?

judge

The greek version agrees with the massoretic text at times too, and at other times it agrees with Aramaic targums.

I dont believe so. The earliest references by the Aramaic speaking church fathers are of the peshitta

Most of here,and definitely the scholarly world comes from the west where we are products of the Catholic Church and protestantism, so we adopt thier traditions.

There is an entirely different tradition which alleges the NT was penned in Aramaic.

The evidence for the primacy of the peshitta has never been subject to thourough analysis.

Therefore we should not just blindly accept the tradition of the protestants and RCC.

judge

The usual argument is that the surviving greek fragments or mss are older than the survivng peshitta mss.

There doesn't seem to be much more.

On the other hand the ammount of evidence favoring the peshitta seems large.

Aramaic Peshitta

Doug Shaver

I haven't seen any arguments one way or the other. From what I understand, though, at that time and in that part of the world, if you were literate, you wrote in Greek unless you were a Roman writing for a Roman readership, in which case you wrote in Latin. On grounds of parsimony if nothing else, then, I think we should suppose by default that the NT documents were originally written in Greek.

I think anyone arguing for a language other than Greek needs to propose a specific alternative and produce some facts inconsistent with the default supposition.
It is not apparent to me how quotations from the Septuagint can give us any useful clues to what language the remainder of the documents were written in.

lpetrich

I agree about the burden of proof.

To understand my argument, consider a tradition about the Septuagint. It got its name from it having been translated by 70 translators, and the tradition is that despite working independently, they had perfect 100% agreement. And this was interpreted as meaning that that translation was divinely inspired, otherwise its translators would not have had perfect 100% agreement with each other.

So if the NT had originally been in some other language, its translators must have been careful to use the exact words of the Septuagint, rather than translating the OT quotes on their own.

Also, as described in Euripides and Luke, the author of Acts was familiar with some well-known phrases and literary motifs; that article describes two.

Chains miraculously falling off of prisoners and doors miraculously opening were a common literary motif in the Greco-Roman world; however, the wording is somewhat variable, and does not tell us much.

But
is perhaps more telling. Kicking against the goads/pricks/spurs (pros kentra laktizein) is famously found in Euripides's Bacchae:
However, as Peter Kirby showed in that article, this phrase was a common way of describing an effort to resist a god -- and was often repeated word for word.

So either Acts was originally written in Greek or its translator had carefully put in that phrase when translating it from another language.

Doug Shaver

Hmm. Whereas, if the NT had originally been in Greek, its authors would have . . . . ?

Malachi151

There are a few points here.

1) The closeness of the texts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, indicate that Matthew and Luke both copied directly from Mark or at least that these three copied from some third source, and that all of this copying was done in the same language, due to the exact word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark, closeness of the text. i.e. this argues against Matthews copying Mark from one language into another language. This means that to cover the synoptics, we only need to really figure out what language Mark was originally written in.

2) Mark clearly appears to have been written in Greek, if for no other reason than the fact that he "quotes Jesus" in Aramaic and then provides the translations into Greek, for example:

To argue that Mark was originally written in Aramaic at this point one would need to find evidence that shows in every case where Mark does this ("Aramaic" - which means, "Greek"), that this was added later by some other writer, and there is no evidence for this, and furthermore, this is also copied into Matthew (and Luke I believe), indicating not only that it was there when when made their copies, but also that they wrote their in Greek because if they wrote their in Aramaic they wouldn't have copied such a statement, they would have re-phrased it since at that point there would have been no need to give a translation.

3) No one in history ever claimed that any text of the gospels was originally written in Aramaic except for Matthew, which no one had evidence of, they just said that they heard it from someone else.

4) All of the earliest fragments of the gospels are in Greek.

5) Many of the claimed phrases that work better in Aramaic don't. For example the supposed "eye of the needle" quote which, could be shown as a mistranslation of an Aramaic word that would render "It would be easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a rope to pass through the eye of a needle", except for the fact that "camel pass through the eye of a needle" was a real phrase that was used at the time, and is recorded in other texts that pre-date the gospels, indicating that there is no need to find a "better translation: for this phrase.

6) It seems that Aramaic the first language of the author of Mark, who nevertheless wrote in Greek, because the phrases and writing style of Mark indicates a poor grasp of Greek, using a very limited vocabulary, and Greek terms that were known to be used in the Aramaic speaking communities. Its likely that Mark was an Aramaic speaking Jew who wrote in Greek for an audience of "Jews and Gentiles" after the destruction of Judea by the Romans.

Mark was either written by a poor Greek writer or translated from Aramaic to Greek by a poor Greek translator, who then added text to Mark to say things like "Aramaic" - which means "Greek", however there is no evidence for this, and in either case, Matthew and Luke were defiantly copied from a Greek source into Greek.

There is no dispute at all that John was written in Greek, the language of John is considered high quality Greek and John uses Greek alliteration and colloquialisms.

And by the way, the early Christians WANTED the gospels to have been originally written in Aramaic, so they wouldn't have claimed they were written in Greek unless this was pretty irrefutable and widely known.

This is why they claimed that Matthew was written in Aramaic and that Matthew was written first, because Matthew was one of the longest gospels that had the most "details" about the life of Jesus and had the virgin birth story, thus they said this was written in Aramaic to give it prominence to make it seem "more authentic" since Aramaic would have been the "original language of Jesus".

So, the "Aramaic first" claims are based on two things, 1) a desire to show that the gospels were written in the "original language of Jesus, thereby supposedly making them more authentic and reliable, and 2) the desire of the churches of peshitta tradition to gain prominence and show they they are the "true Christians".

No Robots

Indeed, but the imagery is Jewish:

A man is never shown in a dream a date palm of gold, or an elephant going through the eye of a needle (because he never thinks of such things). --Berakoth 55b.

Regardless of what language the Gospels were originally written in, they derive from a wholly Jewish cultural context.

seebs

Is it necessarily the case that all of it was in the same language originally?

Malachi151

I don't think there is any dispute about that (except perhaps the term "wholly"). Almost all of the gospels are quotes from the "OT" texts. You can almost reconstruct the whole gospel of Mark by cutting and pasting from the Septuagint i.e. "Old Testament".